Losing the plot
Our bathroom had dark-blue wallpaper with birds and flowers on it, like the wallpaper in an English country house. The paintwork was putty-coloured, with a putty-coloured bath shelf that Dad had built for Mum. As well as room for Mum’s mug of Nescafé, it had a sloping holder with a lip to hold her book, or the latest issue of the Bulletin. Once I was having a bubble bath with a jar of hard boiled sweets on the shelf, and Dad called me a little sybarite. In the bathroom cupboard was a wide-mouthed orange plastic jug. Its lip was shaped like an upper lip, with a cupid’s bow. This is the jug Mum would use to wash our hair, and as I write that, I can see my sister’s fine, straight hair being washed with it, hanging down her back while I sit in the bath behind. I used to like to force the jug under the bathwater, filled with air, then let the air out in huge, transparent bubbles.
This is my first memory of American politics. I’m not sure where they come from, but I am in our bathroom and I have a sheet of satirical stickers about Richard Nixon. They are the kind of stickers that are cut into shapes, and when you peel them off, they will leave thin, odd-shaped pieces of blank white sticker behind. And I don’t think I know who Richard Nixon is, but one of the stickers has the phrase on it and it shows Nixon on there too, or maybe that’s something I’ve heard my Mum and Dad say, or maybe I’m pasting that in now, from the present day, when I’m someone who has taken a great deal of interest in Richard Nixon, who has even seen the door that was broken into by the Watergate burglars, the door itself, and the piece of Sellotape they used to hold the lock open. Mum says that she remembers those years, being at home with us as babies, praying that she would live long enough to find out what really happened with Watergate.
